Actually, I started falling in love with the films of Brian De Palma. He was the first filmmaker I ever loved, he always made genre films. They touched me more, they felt warm, and human, and unsettling. There was always his vision behind them.

Well, my mom had me at 22 and my sister at 24. When I think about her trying to raise these two young girls in Manhattan, having grown up in an incredibly conservative family and her having a more progressive calling for a more liberal life… It was my mother’s bravery, and my mother’s pursuit of her creative life that made it possible for me to have the one I currently have.

One was Roscoe Gilkey Dickinson. He had got his doctorate in physical chemistry — x-ray crystallography — in 1920. He was the first person to get a Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology. And he was continuing with x-ray crystallography, determining the structure of inorganic crystals. After I had accepted appointment as a graduate student at California Institute of Technology, A.A. Noyes, the head of the division of chemistry and chemical engineering, wrote to say that he had decided I should work with Roscoe Dickinson on determining the structure of crystals. This was really extremely fortunate for me, in my opinion. I don’t think that there was any field that was more suited to my interests, and I don’t really know why Dr. Noyes selected me out of eight or ten new graduate students to do x-ray crystallography. Dickinson had a remarkable mind. He was a very careful investigator and thinker, a very logical thinker. When he was teaching me x-ray crystallography, he also taught me to ask at each stage in the argument, “What assumptions are being made? How reliable is the conclusion that you draw? What chance is there that one of the assumptions you have made is not correct?” “You should recognize,” he said to me, “that there is in almost every investigation a lack of complete rigor. You should understand just how reliable the arguments are that you are presenting.

The constant touchstone for me has been the Lecoq school and the mask work and clowning in Queensland

I was going to be a journalist. But after the war I studied anthropology, just in order to become educated. I thought it was worth knowing the science of man. I still intended to become a journalist, but there were no jobs, because the reporters who had gone to war were coming back and were entitled to their jobs, and the women who had replaced them were damned if they’d leave, and they shouldn’t have left.

I don’t know. When I was a soldier I just didn’t want to be hurt. I hoped it wouldn’t hurt. So I suppose painlessly because I hate pain and I love sleep.

I don’t think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don’t have that feeling. I don’t have that sort of control. I’m simply becoming.

What makes life worth living are the saints I meet-they can be long-time friends or someone I meet on a street. They find a way to behave decently in an indecent society.

I’m lucky…that I’m free to do art, and presumably to keep my soul growing, by finding something else to do. Participation in the arts--drawing, dancing, and all that--makes the soul grow. That’s why you engage in it. That’s how you grow a soul.

In our lives, we do our best to serve our community well, behave decently, and treat people well.